A Position Paper on Steven Pinkers Why Academics Stink at Writing

I find this material by Steven Pinker a useful tool for professionals and experts of all fields of science. It talks about the obstacles in effective writing and explains the causes of such. It gives a clear message that academics, scholars, and professionals should improve their writing style so they can share the fruit of their intellectual labor. Their indifference in writing effectively is not an unexplainable phenomenon though because as Pinker observed, there are few incentives for writing well.Pinker enumerated the common mistakes of writers and their attitude towards writing which make it hard for readers to understand what writers are trying to say. The most notable of these are professional narcissism, hedging, and curse of knowledge. Professional narcissism is more of an attitude of writers since it is their mindset that leads to errors in delivering a message. According to Pinker, scholars and professionals are usually focused on impressing their co-scholars, rather than giving a clear explanation to those who are not familiar with the field. Since they view their filed more as a profession than a world that is worth sharing to those not aware of it, they tend to be self-conscious of the words they use that they forget how unfamiliar their readers are on the information they are presenting. Thus, their language becomes stiff, rather than clear. This is a big problem because scholarly literature is supposed to translate jargons into concepts that are understandable to laymen. Hedging, on the other hand, refers to the deliberate practice of writers to state a fact that is conditional, one that is not true in all circumstances, without stating the conditions before such fact becomes applicable. Instead of telling the readers the circumstances when these facts hold true and when they are not applicable, writers omit such explanations and hide behind the words, partially, predominantly, presumably, and the likes. This is disadvantageous for the readers because it robs them of the opportunity to know when they can assume these facts and when they cannot. Scholars and experts in the field are supposed to shed light on these areas because nobody else aside from them is expected to know these things. Curse of knowledge is another notable error of writers. Its their common mistake to assume that technical terms they usually, maybe daily, encounter in their field are understandable to laymen when in fact, they dont even ring a bell to outsiders. Sometimes, even when they know that readers are not familiar with these jargons, they mindlessly use them without clarification thinking that explaining the matter would just be a waste of space in their published works.I cannot agree more with everything Pinker wrote in this literary piece, for if his conclusions are not true, why then do students and laymen find it hard to decipher most academic books they get a hold of? Of all the information and observations Pinker mentioned, the general idea that can be concluded is that scholars do not see the urgency of making improvements in their writing style mainly because of two reasons one is that they do not really notice how bad their writing is; and second is that they fail to see the negative effects of their poor writing skills on the readers. Writers of scholarly articles, studies, research and other published works must first admit that they stink at writing. It may be hard for experts on the field to admit it, but they should be unselfish enough to take that first step so they can start with the improvement process. After all, its their obligation to pass the knowledge to the world. They are not really expected to be good in writing because they are better than all of us at something else, namely their respective field. But its about time they start considering their readers more in creating their written work. A good way to start is by keeping in mind that their co-experts in the field are not the most important audience but those who are not familiar with their areas of expertise.